Ken Jennings Busts Another Myth—This Time About the Dead Sea

The saltiest body of water isn't the Dead Sea, as many of us have been taught. Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings reveals the location of the world's true record holder. And you won't believe where it is.

Well-intentioned social studies teachers often tell kids things about geography that just aren’t true. Mount Everest isn’t the tallestor the highest mountain on Earth, strictly speaking. And the Sahara isn’t even close to being the world’s largest desert—arid Antarctica, where it’s too cold to snow much, is much bigger. Which brings us to the famous Dead Sea. You might have heard or read that the lake between Israel and Jordan is the saltiest on Earth. Nope! You have to go to Antarctica for that too.

The Dry Valleys are a strange region not far from McMurdo Station, the largest U.S. research base in Antarctica. In the Dry Valleys, the Transantarctic Mountains block large sheets of ice from flowing to the Ross Sea here, and high winds coming down from the peaks evaporate what little snow falls. Year-round, these valleys make up the largest patch of snow-free rock on a vast, icy continent.

Because of their surprisingly un-snowy state, the Dry Valleys are home to some unusual water features. For example, this is where you’d find Antarctica’s longest river, the Onyx. It’s only 20 miles long, and only flows with glacial melt for a few months during the brief polar summer, but that’s enough to make it the Antarctic equivalent of the Nile or the Amazon.

In 1961, two U.S. Navy helicopter pilots were flying across the region when they came across something unusual: a small, shallow lake just seven acres in area that appeared to be unfrozen. Upon investigation, the lake’s temperature was measured to be -22 degrees Fahrenheit, and yet it stays melted year-round. That’s because it’s a hypersaline lake, full of enough sodium chloride and potassium chloride to lower its freezing point to a sub-Antarctic temperature. Its salinity level has been measured at 40 percent, making it 18 times saltier than the ocean and more than twice as salty as the Dead Sea!

Today, visitors to the pond enjoy the swirling patterns of salts left by evaporated lake water, as well as the pond’s strange ventifacts—rocks carved into unearthly shapes by millennia of windblown ice and sand. There’s nothing particularly romantic about the spot, however. Don Juan Pond has nothing to do with the legendary Spanish lover of the same name. In fact, it was named for the two pilots who discovered it, Lt. Donald Roe and Lt. John Hickey.